Anne Sexton

The House

In dreams

the same bad dream goes on.

Like some gigantic German toy

the house has been rebuilt

upon its kelly-green lawn.

The same dreadful set,

the same family of orange and pink faces

carved and dressed up like puppets

who wait for their jaws to open and shut.

Nineteen forty-two,

nineteen forty-three,

nineteen forty-four...

it's all the same. We're at war.

They've rationed the gas for all three cars.

The Lincoln Continental breathes in its stall,

a hopped up greyhound waiting to be sprung.

The Irish boy

who dated her

(lace curtain Irish, her mother said)

urges her through the lead-colored garages

to feel the patent-leather fenders

and peek at the mileage.

All that money!

and kisses too.

Kisses that stick in the mouth

like the vinegar candy she used to pull

with her buttery fingers, pull

until it was white like a dog's bone,

white, thick and impossible to chew.

Father,

an exact likeness,

his face bloated and pink

with black market scotch,

sits out his monthly bender

in his custom-made pajamas

and shouts, his tongue as quick as galloping horses,

shouts into the long distance telephone call.

His mouth is as wide as his kiss.

Mother,

with just the right gesture,

kicks her shoes off,

but is made all wrong,

impossibly frumpy as she sits there

in her alabaster dressing room

sorting her diamonds like a bank teller

to see if they add up.

The maid

as thin as a pencil stick,

holds dinner as usual,

rubs her angry knuckles over the porcelain sink

and grumbles at the gun-shy bird dog.

She knows something is going on.

She pricks a baked potato.

The aunt,

older than all the crooked women

in The Brothers Grimm,

leans by a gooseneck lamp in her second floor suite,

turns up her earphone to eavesdrop

and continues to knit,

her needles working like kitchen shears

and her breasts blown out like two

pincushions.

The houseboy,

a quick-eyed Filipino,

slinks by like a Japanese spy

from French Provincial room

to French Provincial room,

emptying the ash trays and plumping up

the down upholstery.

His jacket shines, old shiny black,

a wise undertaker.

The milkman walks in his cartoon

every other day in the snoozy dawn,

rattling his bottles like a piggy bank.

And gardeners come, six at a time,

pulling petunias and hairy angel bells

up through the mulch.

This one again, made vaguely and cruelly,

one eye green and one eye blue,

has the only major walk-on so far,

has walked from her afternoon date

past the waiting baked potatoes,

past the flashing back of the Japanese spy,

up the cotton batten stairs,

past the clicking and unclicking of the earphones,

turns here at the hall

by the diamonds that she'll never earn

and the bender that she kissed last night

among thick set stars, the floating bed

and the strange white key...

up like a skein of yarn,

up another flight into the penthouse,

to slam the door on all the years

she'll have to live through...

the sailor who she won't with,

the boys who will walk on

from Andover, Exeter and St. Marks,

the boys who will walk off with pale unlined faces,

to slam the door on all the days she'll stay the same

and never ask why and never think who to ask,

to slam the door and rip off her orange blouse.

Father, father, I wish I were dead.

At thirty-five

she'll dream she's dead

or else she'll dream she's back.

All day long the house sits

larger than Russia

gleaming like a cured hide in the sun.

All day long the machine waits: rooms,

stairs, carpets, furniture, people —

those people who stand at the open windows like objects

waiting to topple.